The Internet has emerged as a critical commerce and communications platform for businesses and consumers worldwide. The dramatic growth in the number of Internet users, coupled with the increased availability of powerful new tools and equipment that enable the development, processing, and distribution of data across the Internet have led to a proliferation of Internet-based applications. These applications include e-commerce, e-mail, electronic file transfers, and online interactive applications. As the number of users of, and uses for, the Internet increases so does the complexity and volume of Internet traffic. According to UUNet, Internet traffic doubles every 100 days. Because of this traffic and its business potential, a growing number of companies are building businesses around the Internet and developing mission-critical business applications to be provided by the Internet.
Existing enterprise data networks (“EDNs”) that support e-commerce applications providing services to customers are straining under the demand to provide added performance and added services. The growing customer demands for services, along with a highly competitive market, has resulted in increasingly complex ad hoc EDNs. Affordable, high-performance EDN solutions require extensive scalability, very high availability, and ease of management. These attributes are significantly compromised or completely lost as existing solutions are grown to meet the demand.
Current architectures of EDNs typically include three sub-networks: 1) a local area network (LAN) for web and database servers, 2) a computational network for application servers, and 3) a storage area network (SAN). The processing and storage elements attached to these sub-networks may have access to a wide area network (WAN) or metropolitan area network (MAN) through a bridging device commonly known as an edge switch. Each of these sub-networks typically uses a distinct protocol and associated set of hardware and software including network interface adapters, network switches, network operating systems, and management applications. Communication through the EDN requires bridging between the sub-networks that requires active participation of server processing resources for protocol translation and interpretation.
There are many disadvantages to the current architecture of EDNs. The disadvantages result primarily because the multi-tiered architecture is fractured and complex. First, it is very difficult to integrate the disparate systems that use different communications protocols, interfaces, and so on. Second, overall performance suffers because each sub-network is managed separately, rather than being managed with comprehensive knowledge of the complete network. Third, the cost of maintaining three disparate types of network hardware and software can be high. Fourth, it is difficult to scale an architecture that uses such disparate systems. It would be desirable to have an architecture for EDNs that would be alleviate the many disadvantages of the current fractured multi-tiered architectures.